I decided to dedicate this past weekend to understanding Vista. I played with it, worked with it, and surprisingly never wanted to give up on it. When initially setting my computer up I found the User Account Control (UAC) to be a little annoying since you are prompted for administrator approval just to move shortcuts around in the Start Menu. I ended up disabling for about 10-minutes while I got everything ready to go and then I re-enabled it (this can be done in the User Accounts located in the Control Panel). After getting past the initial setup stage it is great to have the additional security that UAC provides.
Everything was going good but for some reason when I installed Vista it did not recognize any of my other Windows installations. On my desktop computer I had installed Vista and XP on a seperate hard drives, but on my laptop I had Vista on one partition and XP on another.
My initial thought was to edit the boot.ini file like I always did in XP, but fumbling through the new layout in Vista only led me to find out that a new boot manager is being used. The new boot manager, called Boot Configuration Data Editor, did not seem all that easy to manipulate the settings because it uses the DOS prompt for everything.
I spent quite a bit of time searching for an easy way to change the settings and then I stumbled upon the free software called VistaBootPRO. The screenshot above shows you the program and you can see how easy it is to change the boot options. One thing that is really great is the ability to backup your boot manager before you change anything, that way you don’t have to worry as much about screwing something up.
You have to make sure you run VistaBootPRO as the Administrator which can easily be done by right-clicking on the shortcut and selecting “Run as Administrator.” After I got the boot manager working Vista was much more fun to use. Once the Antivirus companies start developing compatible software then I will be truly happy.
One of my favorite features of Vista on my laptop is the ability to select different power plans which help me save even more battery life: Power Saver, Balanced, or High Performance. In Windows XP I could get about 6.5 hours of battery life on my Dell M140 laptop, but if I put Vista in Power Saver mode it will give me about 7.5 hours with no significant performance loss. This is definitely better than Vista Beta 2 where I could hardly scrape by on 4 hours.
As for program incompatibility the only thing that I have found not to work is Nero 7. However, Mozilla still needs to work on Vista compatibility because the partial updates will never install unless I run the browser as an administrator. That’s because Firefox and Thunderbird are trying to modify the program files with the partial update and Vista requires Administrator rights in order to change them. Hopefully this is something that can easily be resolved.
Overall I can’t wait to get my hands on Vista RC1. The Pre-RC1 that was released last week is running great for me and I’m looking forward to sitting through a long upgrade (a little sarcasm there because people are reporting up to 3.5 hours to upgrade, 
).
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Vista appears to be coming along nicely, but I’ll be interested to see this UAC stuff.
On every setup of XP I use the first thing I do once Windows boots is go to the user account section in Computer Management and delete every user except for Administrator and Guest. As I’m the only one who uses the PC I see no point in there being an Admin account as well as mine, especially if both have the same rights. From what you’re saying it seems like you aren’t running the PC as an Admin and I can’t help wondering why? Is there no option to? Do you have to log in and out repeatedly when installing stuff? Why click run as Admin when you could just be the Admin?
In short, it’s looking nice but the user account stuff annoyed me about XP and I wish they allowed a single user install which wouldn’t have any of that documents and settings crap - a single ‘Profile’ folder on the C: drive (next to a single ‘My Documents’ folder) would have been much nicer.
Microsoft decided for security reasons that users should not be the administrator of the computer by default. Linux has been doing this for quite some time and they must have thought it was a good idea. When you want to install a program it does not make you log out to do so. It simply pops-up with a window asking whether you authorize the program to install.
The new feature definitely takes some getting used to but it is great to have the extra security. There are ways that you can enable the administrator account and use that but it really isn’t that bad.
This is a good article if you want to learn more about how this works and see some screenshots of what it does:
http://www.winsupersite.com/sh.....ff_uac.asp
I installed vista when beta 2 came out but never got in to using it. Was just too buggy and didn’t play nice with open office which I use for work. I installed Pre-RC1 this weekend and have been loving it. It actually had drivers for my hardware(minus my sound blaster live! 5.1, but thats a creative issue) unlike the last time when it didn’t detect my network card, tv tuner, or one of my hard drive controllers. I still had to put a floppy in but I guess I could have used a cd or a USB jump drive to add my sata drivers. I wish Microsoft would at least add some of the more common ones to the installer. Luckily there are hacked drivers out for the SBlive which I found after a quick google search.
The only issue I have left is one website I use for work not allowing me to use anything but IE6. I have not figured anything out there.
Hmm, guess I was lucky that Vista recognized my SATA drive without a problem. All of my drivers work great and the ones that Vista couldn’t install automatically the old ones worked fine (just for my memory card reader).
PROnetworks is not the original author of this program.
This program is built on “borrowed” code, the original author being “Computer Guru” of NeoSmart Technologies.
The real program is EasyBCD and it really works, with more features, less bloat, and no theft of code or intellectual property.
Anywho…. how the hell is VistaBootPRO at version 3.1 when Vista hasn’t even gone gold?
Just look at the changelog: it’s an exact copy of EasyBCD’s… They obviously just look at NeoSmart’s changelog and try to copy it.
Just giving the facts.. CG deserves some credit.
Definitely looks like you’re right but where did they get the source code from? I didn’t see that it was available.
at first, computer guru made (”helped with” according to pronetworks) vistabootpro, then got out of the illegal contract. this resulted in pronetworks starting lawsuits against him, and banning him. he later made easybcd, with none of the oroginal code of vistabootpro, which he did write, and pronetworks reverse-engineered it.
and no, i am not computer guru, nor do i work for/with neosmart. if you don’t believe me…well thats your problem.